The idea came to me one night after work.

At the time, I was the President of a leading estate winery in BC, with a background as a Certified Management Accountant. Earlier that day, I received a phone call from the General Manager of one of our most important corporate clients. He was calling to ask how to order one of our wines. This floored me.

You see, about a year and a half earlier the winery had completed a major sales push. Our whole sales staff busted their butts to get great placements on exclusive wine lists, including several corporate chain restaurants. This push involved our Sales Manager and me flying regularly to Calgary to meet with the senior executive in charge of the corporate wine list for one of these restaurants. We were eventually successful in getting our wine on their list. This represented a serious achievement: we were the only estate-owned winery on this list. We left elated, confident that this placement would translate into a heavy volume of sales and great exposure for our brand, which it did.

So when over a year (and thousands of bottles) later this Manager phones to find out about ordering directly from us, you begin to understand my amazement. I asked him how he had been ordering our wine. Through the local BC Government Liquor Distribution Branch, he replied. This hit me like a ton of grapes. I had just pulled that wine from the BCLDB in order to accommodate the incredible demand from his restaurant. More important though was the massive financial loss this meant for the winery.

Here’s the math: if ordered directly from us, this $12.50 wine nets the winery about $11.50. Ordered through the BCLDB - and therefore subject to the Government’s 55% cut - we just barely scrape six bucks out of the deal. The price to the restaurant is the same regardless of the ordering process but the loss for the winery is astronomical.

While I sat at home that evening, I couldn’t get this scenario from my mind. What seemed simple to me, the President of a winery, was in fact confusing and time-consuming for a restaurant manager. I asked myself, why would a licensee order from the BCLDB as opposed to each individual winery? The answer is simple: it’s easier and quicker.

Even though BC Liquor Control and Licensing allow BC wineries to ship directly to licensees, most licensees choose to go through the BCLDB. There are 161 wineries in the province (and counting) each with its own unique ordering system. For a restaurant or store with twelve different BC wines, that can mean twelve different people to try and contact just to order your wine. This makes what ought to be a straightforward and painless process – for a restaurant, simply ordering the wine you need and for a winery following through on a sale - needlessly laborious and complex.

The solution seemed clear. Why not create one single place where wineries list their wines for sale and licensees order them? This was the birth of Onlineorderdesk.com.

Since then the idea has grown up a bit, maturing into the full service we now offer. Onlineorderdesk.com doesn’t actually sell wine – we facilitate sales, making them simpler and faster – and therefore we don’t charge a commission or ask for a cut of the sales conducted through our site. Instead, we charge a modest monthly fee to host wineries pages on our system. For licensees, we enable you to order all of your BC wines from one, easy-to-use site.

As I see it, we’ve replaced unnecessary complexity and lost sales with simplicity and profit. The beneficiaries of this idea are no less than every winery, restaurant, and wine store in the province. Not bad for a night’s work.

Onlineorderdesk.com, it’s about time.